The classic case I used to see, though not so much anymore, was business owners continuing to use desktop accounting software when they could save literally hours of data entry time and cost by switching to an Internet-based system like Xero.

If you consider the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, famously used by T. Bert Lance, Director of the Office of Management and Budgets in Jimmy Carter’s 1977 administration in America, then you wouldn’t consider a change at all. But whilst it may not be broke if there’s an easier, quicker, cheaper way to do the same process or job, wouldn’t you want to change?

THREE WELL-KNOWN QUOTES THAT RESONATE WITH ME ABOUT WHY WE NEED TO MAKE CHANGES FOR THE FUTURE ARE:

1. “Yesterday is but a dream, tomorrow is only a vision. But today well lived makes yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope.” – Kalil Gibran.

To have a ‘today well lived’ to me means not only living a day full of joy and happiness, doing what you love, spending time with people you love, it’s also about doing the best you can, seeking ways to improve yourself, your business, the world around you.

It’s only when you embrace the change that you grow as a person, improve your business, increase efficiencies and create those wonderful yesterday dreams and tomorrow visions.

2.“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein.

Who better to remind us to ask questions continually, to seek a different way, to improve, to increase efficiencies than the great inventor himself. Whilst we don’t need to be inventing the way that Einstein did, within our businesses, it’s important to keep innovating, to keep looking for improvements and seeking efficiencies.

Going back to my example of changing from desktop software to Internet-based systems; the result is the same but the time it takes to achieve the result is significantly improved.

3. “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” – Barack Obama.

Whether you agree with the politics or not is irrelevant, what’s important is that we need to make the changes ourselves. It’s not a case of waiting for someone to tell us, if you know intuitively that you need to change a system or procedure, change your product or service offerings, the beauty of being in business yourself is you get to make the rules.

You can do whatever you want to do; you can decide to change and proceed with whatever is necessary to implement the change.

CHANGE IS A GOOD THING.

When you make changes to the way you invoice and follow up for payment, it will improve your cash flow. When you change (if you haven’t already) to an internet-based accounting system, the bookkeeping and data entry will be more efficient.

When you change the way you look at your numbers, you will get a different result, when you focus on specific numbers in your business you will improve them. But change just for the sake of change is not a good thing. Change needs to be an improvement from the previous way.

I challenge you to consider just one task you do today and consider what you could do to improve it.